The use of cellular telephony has become an everyday experience for a lot of people. Cellular telephony permits users to have access to voice services (make calls, receive calls, access voice mail, teleconference, and so on) from practically everywhere without the need to be located next to a fixed wireline telephone, or wait for a telephone booth to become available.
However, the use of fixed-line telephony has some compelling advantages. A telephone number associated with a fixed telephone can be “tied” to the environment in which this telephone is located. Thus, the telephone number of a fixed-line telephone in a home can be used as an identifier of that home. This indeed happens today when, for example, various providers of residential services, e.g., water, electricity, and CaTV public utilities, home heating oil and newspaper delivery services, and so on, use a telephone number as a distinguishing identifier of the recipient of the residential service. Even more so, the advent of the tone telephony signaling and the caller ID feature has permitted the development of a number of applications that permit one to use telephony as a means to access controllable services, like home automation facilities, remotely. For example, this is achieved by installing a telephony-enabled device in a home and connect it to an available public switched telephone network (PSTN) jack in the home. The ring signal generated when calling the telephone number for this PSTN jack could activate a device which then could receive commands remotely by sending it tones generated by a tone dialing telephone (not unlike the practically ubiquitous touch-tone, voice response, interactive services). Doing so, one can use such a system to, say, activate environmental control (heat/AC) services remotely.
One drawback for these purely telephony-based, home devices are that they have limited, if any, capabilities in providing “feedback” or status information for the devices that they control. Interactivity using visual means and in particular textual and graphics means could greatly enhance user experience in accessing remotely and controlling processes that interest various users.
Recently, a new generation of cellular phones have been introduced that take advantage of data cellular services, which is a distinct service from cellular voice telephony, to display data information provided to them by cellular data service and content providers. This information is shown on small displays (typically, 4 to 5 20-character lines) on these cellular phones. These cellular phones are some times called web-phones as the data services provided on them resemble the point-and-click experience and the information collecting and searching capabilities encountered on the Worldwide Web (WWW) using a web-browser on a notebook or desktop computer. Sometimes these phones are also called WAP phones, since a good number of them are using the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) communications protocol suite for carrying the data services to the phones.
Data services on cellular phones focus primarily on e-commerce applications (purchasing of goods through “e-tailers” with presence on the Web), on-line banking, news, stock quote announcements, e-mail and messaging, audio/video downloads, and so on. All these services on the “wireless Web,” a term that we would use without necessary implying the use of the WWW, WAP, etc., protocols, allow the users of the wireless Web to contact businesses, and/or retrieve and manipulate business related information, and/or retrieve casual information (e.g., sports news broadcasting) from service and content providers.
It would be advantageous to further enhance the usability of the wireless Web by providing a capability to use one's personal communication devices, e.g., the cellular phone, to access and manipulate information and processes that they do not necessarily fall in the traditional e-commerce/e-business category.